The Amsorak Adventurer's Guild

5e D&D set in Mystara

After a quick stay in Brethold to rest up and recover, the party heads straight back to the mansion ruins to get to the bottom of this Red Cloak debacle. They make their way to the crypt and both rogues decide to have a quick look around the now-empty coffins. Caladhiel discovers a box with a bracelet and some gold coins that she shares amongst the party. Erulissë shrugs, having found nothing. (Mirimë is suspicious – she found ‘nothing’ in that chapel back at the monastery, honestly, and look where that got them.)
In the next room is an armoury where the party help themselves to dull, worn red cloaks just incase they’ve need to be more convincing Red Cloaks in the future.
The party heads back to the main room. Brum, chuckling to himself, crosses one of two bridges that span a chasm in the room. As he reaches the other side, Wizz pauses his 90s remix deluxe to light a small pebble and toss it into the chasm. It illuminates a small ravine of perhaps 20 feet. The sides are slick and steep and dark with moss and lichen, but unmistakably illuminated against the far side, a thing clings to the rock. With a single, bulbous eye, it tracks the movement of the pebble and then fixes a malevolent, endless gaze on Wizzard.

A brief catch up from the previous session

Following clues from the villagers, and specifically young Carp Alderleaf, the heroes investigate the ruins of Tresendor Manor. One group uncover a stairway down into the old cellars, whilst the others find Carp’s passage leading into a cavernous chamber.

The first group soon realise that the cellar hides secrets; it appears to be abandoned, but that is clearly not the case! A group of Redcloaks are waiting behind a door. They are soon dispatched.
Meanwhile, the second group explore the huge chamber. It seems to have suffered some damage in the past. A chasm splits the floor; bridged at a couple of points, and pillars support the ceiling, some of them bearing torch sconces.
A strange whispering voice seemed to be tempting the heroes, whilst claiming to know their deepest secrets. They took care to avoid it, and explored deeper.
The first group, having cleared a bunk room of Redcloaks (clearly where they lay low when there is trouble in town) then found a secret door. Through it a passageway led to a huge chamber, they were reunited with their companions.
On the far side of the chasm, the heroes found a room where the Redcloaks were relaxing. They were even dicing for some of their ill-gotten gains.

The party split up, explore, and become official. And get dogs.

The party are, broadly, exhausted when they finally arrive in Brethald. The fight against the Bugbear was swift but still trying, and the long walk from the cave to Brethald was filled, not with relaxing silence, but with Sildar’s painstaking descriptions of how he would have fought it, if he’d had a sword.
Newly formed, the party almost decide to split up for the night and find their own accommodations, but practicality and the promise of a good inn have them sticking together.
In the morning, the party diverge to follow their own interests in town. Mirimë respects Erulissë’s desire for a private reunion (or possibly confrontation?) with her aunt, and instead goes her own way. She finds the stories of the Redbrands they overheard the night before as distasteful as the rest of the group, but something about the thought of harming humans doesn’t sit quite well with her… She leaves that to Wizzard and, promising to meet up with Brum and Caladhiel at the town hall, she heads off to the supply shop where they exchanged their cargo the night before. The gentleman who owns the shop won’t take her hefty, unused war hammer – he deals mainly in food, he says – but he does point her in the direction of the trade house down the road, where she gets a respectable 7 gold for the thing. Her feet literally lighter, Mirimë meanders on to the town hall. As she’s walking into the grand building, a sturdy looking mastiff catches her eye across the dusty square. A quick enquiry later and Mirimë enters the town hall with one hand in her gold purse, wondering whether the money from her war hammer might be well spent on a war dog…?
Inside, to Mirimë’s pleasure, Caladhiel’s discomfort and Brum’s stoic acceptance, their party had become an officially sanctioned adventurer’s guild!
The night is spent eating far too much pie and drinking even more sweet halfing wine at the farm of Erulissë’s aunt. The stout halfing woman strokes her dimpled chin and muses that the man most likely to know where Gundren has been taken is back in the direction of Fort Lakeside.
In the morning they set off once more. Brum, Wizzard and Erulissë take to the disreputable tavern that lurks at the end of the street on which they had previously stayed. With a stern glance at her halfing friend who is already weighing out weighted dice in her small palm, Mirimë and Caladhiel head to the house of the woodworker they had heard had been murdered. A search of his house stirs Mirimë’s heart – his son’s toys have been left abandoned on the threadbare rug, and she imagines that the small, rippled looking glass that lies shattered on the floor was once used by his daughter to comb her hair. Just as they are about to leave, Mirimë spots a small piece of torn red cloth, snagged against a key hook.
On their way back to the others, the two elves run into Erulissë, who excitedly tells them of both the money she had won and the impressive riding dogs her aunt had told her the local orchard keeper bred and trained. Recalling the fine mastiff she had seen the day before, Mirimë is eager to seek out this man. His smallholding is not at all far, just far enough removed from the town that the constant barking of many dogs is not immediately evident. The owner of the place is impressed by their official charter but his eyes are canny. They’ll need more than a flashy bit of paper from that Sildar fool before he’ll sell them anything more dangerous than a jug of cider.
Meeting back at the town hall, the party decide what to do next. Brum (who for some reason, is eyeing a singed, whimpering man in a red cloak) asserts that the first thing to do must be to track down the Redbrands. After all, they’re terrorising the town and they might know something about Gundren’s whereabouts.
However, Mirimë’s mind is made up. Something, whether it be a gut instinct or the gentle persuasion of Protius guiding her, insists that clearing out the Redbrands is not the task to do now. Her mind goes again and again to the mastiff she had seen the day before… Its collar had been embossed with tridents, she recalls – what greater sign could be needed?
The next morning, elves, halfling, human and dwarf set out into the wild once more. It is a two day journey to the old well watchtower they’re aiming for, and luckily it passes without incident.
When they arrive at the edge of the forest and see the ruin before them, it is almost sad in its lack of grandeur, so evident is the majesty that must once have looked out over the surrounding hills.
What catches Mirimë’s attention, however, is the sense of extreme wrongness. The figures that she can see moving around the base of the tower are shuffling, stumbling, disorganised and deranged in their movements. She clenches her hand around her holy symbol – a trident carved from bone-White driftwood washed up on the shores of a distant sea, framed by tiny shells and sea glass. Undead unnerve Mirimë. She cannot look into their sightless, empty eyes and not recall the inanimate movement of the corpses on the shipwreck, so long ago…
Almost without realising it, she has drifted close enough to the corpses to sense the necromantic magic that surrounds them. Above her head, four vivid lights dance in the sky.
The flap on the royal blue tent she has found swishes to the side and a short, portly, clean shaven human wizard marches out. The undead lurch to obedience around him. He casts sharp eyes over the landscape and calls out with unnerving calm that he knows they are there…
The image of dead bodies in water rushes through Mirimë’s mind and she knows that she would rather die at the end of a hostile spell than in the arms of an undead. Erulissë gives her a nod from where she crouches, feet away, and readies her short bow. Mirimë stands, and calls out.
It is not long before the whole party has been revealed and Wizzard is talking easily if not amiably with the other wizard. Later, Brum will furiously insist that the necromancer was glaring at him, that one of the zombies was edging towards him the whole time, but Mirimë doesn’t see it.
It is not until they depart with the possibility of a new quest on their hands that she allows herself to release her holy symbol.
The journey back to Brethald is uneventful – until they are woken in the night by Wizzard screaming and choking, sparks flying impotently from his fingers and a giant thing attached to his neck.
Mirimë leaps forward, not noticing the three other enemies circling their party, and grabs for the creature on Wizzard. Its body is hot and rough yet damp and cloying under her fingers, like a healing scab or a festering wound. Magic and the power of Protius surge through her – with a sharp pinching noise, the creature explodes into nothingness.
By the time Mirimë has caught her breath, only the charred remains of two more creatures and the bloody remains of the fourth reveal that they were even attacked. Unsettled, the party get no more sleep that night and set off early to return to Brethald.
It is past noon when they reach the orchard. The orchard keeper hears their report gratefully and commends them on their wisdom. He is either going deaf in his old age or he is tactfully ignoring Brum, who mutters about that being an awful lot of trouble for an evil racist wizard and some flees.
Nonetheless, when the party at last gain the city centre, they are accompanied by two slender, lean hounds whose coats gleam dull red and soft purple in the evening light. Mirimë rests her hand upon the back of her mastiff’s head. He is assuredly a sign from Protius that she is on the right track with this adventure group…and she has always loved dogs.
The party settle down to rest. In the morning, there’ll be Redbrands to fight!

Rogues are scarier than they look...

An arrow flies through the dark! With a muffled thwack it shudders into the body of the goblin sentry guarding the bridge. Sadly, it’s Mirimë’s second attempt at killing the goblin, and the first attempt was shoddy enough that the damned thing managed to cry out. Its body tumbles from the log and splashes into the stream, where it is washed sluggishly down to where the rest of the party waits. But the sound of shrill shrieking, rumbling, creaking and groaning, fills the tunnel…
At the top of a scree slope, Erulissë crouches in the shadows. She’s good at that. She can see flickering firelight and hear the unwelcome sound of goblin chatter – far more goblin chatter than she can handle by herself, trusty as her rapier may be. Brumbjörn’s appearance is definitely a welcome one.
Water floods from further up the tunnel, so swiftly and suddenly that it can only be a deliberate release. The party scurry to the safest extremes of the cave – Mirimë and Caladhiel to the crumbling base of the scree slope, Wizzard to the cavern that they left the wolves in. He’s not going to risk getting his feet wet, after all.
The two elves pick their way precariously up the slope, following Brumbjörn’s path as closely as they can. They gain the top without incident.
A small chamber is revealed at the end of a short tunnel. Within, a small group of goblins crowd around a fire. On a ledge above them, a larger goblin, his clothing a touch more ornate than the usual goblin scraps, leers down. At his feet is a human man – it’s Sildar Hallwinter!
A quick negotiation is initiated and almost ruined (they can’t not loot the body) before a fight breaks out. The party defeat the goblins without trouble. Just before the lead goblin is killed, he chokes out a warning – Klarg will have them for this!
The party take the time to have a short rest (and a rifle through some crates belonging to a wealthy merchant. They’ll return the crates of course, and if they’re a few wine bottles lighter, well, they’re easier to carry.) Sildar has heard of Klarg and talks about him in a nervous way. He relates that Brumbjörn’s cousin Gundren has been taken elsewhere.
Rested (and a little bit tipsy) the party set off once more to clear out the goblin cavern. A giant cavern opens up at the end of the tunnel. It’s filled with the unchanging light of an enchanted stone and the invigorating beat of constantly switching power ballads.
There’s a swift skirmish, in which a small horde of goblins are killed, and Mirimë is severely wounded. A quick healing spell stabilises her.
The party reaches the very depths of the cave. A small fire snaps in a pit, casting shifting shadows across stacked crates. The shadows hide Erulissë and Caladhiel . . . and something else. A bugbear lurches from the deepest shadows. This is Klarg. His matted, greasy fur looks especially eerie in the light of the now-rose gold fire. A trunkated branch with crude, sharp metal hooks is his weapon, and behind him a wolf with a spiked collar bares bloody teeth. Klarg lurches forward, aiming for Brumbjörn with his hefty weapon. Before he can bring it down in a surely devastating blow, twin rapiers flash from the shadows and he is imapled on either side. His death is not instant, but it is not drawn out – and he is actually worth looting.
The wolf whimpers around his master’s corpse and is swiftly knocked unconscious. It’s the kindest thing, Brumbjörn insists.
Exhausted but triumphant, the party at last make their way to Brethalt. They barter at a merchant’s shop, swapping the location of the missing wine crates for a respectable amount of gold. The party go their separate ways for the night, anxious over Gundren’s whereabouts but secure in their status as allies – and perhaps friends?

Journey to Brethald

A dwarf, two elves, a human and a halfling walk into a bar . . . no, really. The dwarf offers the others a job – if they can keep up with him.
Having set off, escorting the cart of supplies to Brethald, the conversation between the group flounders
Barely a word is spoken on the second day, until they come across the body of a horse; specifically, the horse of the man who is supposed to be paying them.
Identifying an ambush far faster than the rest of the group would ever give him credit for, Wizzard conjures an apparition of a cart and sends it trundling down the road towards the horse. Sure enough, the image is swiftly set upon by a small group of goblins.
The party soon defeats them, and gains a healthy respect for Brumbjörn’s axes in the process. The remaining goblin is captured and leads them to its layer.
After defeating the paltry guard outside the layer (stopping only to loot their bodies), the party proceed into the dim cavern. The sound of snarling breaks through the quiet lull of the stream that cuts through the dark, rocky floor. Shadows seem to shift, and, when they progress around a corner into a small cavern, the shifting light coalesces into three wolves, tied insecurely to a stalagmite.
Caladhiel soothes the creatures and the cavern is explored and quickly dismissed as empty of anything of any great importance.
Moving further into the cave, Erulissë parts from the group and scales an unsteady scree path, whilst Mirimë wanders in the other direction and disturbs a goblin sentry on a bridge…